Potternator
by Dana Short
Summary: Skynet sent an avatar of itself back to change history. It's mission - Terminate the "Savior of the Wizarding World" before he can threaten Skynet. Too bad it didn't know that when dealing with Harry Potter that nothing goes as it should.
1. Chapter 1

The version of the Terminator universe used in this story bares a vague impression at best of the ones from the various movies, books, and television shows, and I own none of them. Similarly the Harry Potter universe isn't mine either. I am just borrowing characters and elements from their concepts to have a bit of fun. Any resemblance to reality is amazingly coincidental, including any similarities with the basic underlying physics by which our universe is run. I am neither a physicist, nanotech engineer, biologist, wizard, or any other type of informed specialist which would have the slightest chance of actually knowing about how our universe would correlate to the one expressed in this story.

If this seems familiar to you, it may be. This is a slight retooling of a version of this story I was playing with a while ago. At present there are 3 chapters somewhat completed on my hard drive (meaning Chapter 2 at least should be posted here within the next week, and Chapter 3 may as well, unless it becomes Chapter 4 or 5, which is possible.) and the fourth also exists albeit in a rather more confuseled state of disarray than I would ever allow to see the light of day. (Persons trying to read it in it's current form would go mad from trying to tie the disassociated concepts together into a coherent whole.) Meaning it is possible this story may stall out at 3 chapters. (Looks at the other stories posted here.) Um, very possible. But I promise to try and work on it between now and New Years whenever I have free time and can't sleep.

= _Snip Here to separate story from non-story_ =

**Potternator**

As the clocks within the houses counted town the last minutes before midnight, the warm summer darkness was shattered by the sudden appearance of a globe of energy, which bloomed out of nowhere to hang, crackling in the air, and casting odd lights onto the houses and cars which lined the previously quiet urban road.

Suddenly the globe collapsed, leaving only a large silver puddle on the asphalt of Privet Drive.

Slowly a lump formed in the center of the puddle, rising until it formed a column, which then changed its shape until it resembled a human shaped silver statue.

Colors filled in, and those then seemed to alter, gaining texture, and after a few moments a perfectly normal looking, if somewhat non-descript older woman stood in the middle of the street, with no sign left of the silver puddle, or the energy sphere which had preceded it.

She looked first one way, then another, scanning to insure no one had noticed her arrival, before turning towards the darkened front of Number 4.

She was following the initial task required to satisfy her primary programming - terminate "Harry Potter", which records showed had been raised here as a young child, so that is where he should currently be, since today was the eve of his fifth birthday.

-=+=-

The cybernetic entity reached out and casually crushed the doorknob, snapping the locking pins with a casual twist of her wrist, and opened the front door without even breaking step.

Scanning the interior, she determined that the primary domicile was upstairs, and proceeded to the master bedroom.

The figure stepped silently into the bedroom, bypassing the huge misshapen lump on the bed, and moving towards the unusually large crib in the corner where the child lay sleeping.

She reached down and plucked the extremely overweight child from his bed, then casually crushed its skull with a noise similar to that of a dropped melon splattering on the kitchen floor.

The noise was enough to awaken the pair of light sleepers on the overburdened king-sized bed, and Vernon Dursley bellowed in anger as he made out the shape standing over his son's bed.

Lunging towards the dark shape, he managed to impale his enormous bulk on a silver spike which replaced the woman's left hand, piercing his chest cleanly throygh his heart, and ending his life in an instant.

Petunia Dursley fared little better, despite doing nothing more than sitting up on the bed and screaming as the woman reached out with her pair of once more human looking hands, both of which were covered in blood, one her child's, and one her husband's, and snapped her rather long neck with a violent twist of Petunia's head.

As silence fell once more over the house, the Terminator scanned the dwelling. Records showed there should have been four inhabitants. The three she had so far located were obviously the Dursleys, which meant her primary objective, Harry Potter, was still elsewhere on the premises.

Her new scan showed a single individual still in the dwelling, back on the first floor.

She headed back down the stairs, then maneuvered until she was facing the closed and locked cupboard where her scans showed the missing child to be.

-=+=-

Pulling the cupboard door off the wall, and breaking the padlock and hinges as she did so, she revealed the primary target of her mission - Harry Potter.

The boy was cowering in the back of the cupboard, wide green eyes open in obvious fear, as he cradled a broken arm to his chest protectively.

"Wha.. Who are you?" Harry asked the apparent elderly lady. He had heard the footsteps as someone had gone upstairs, then had heard his Uncle Vernon's bellow as well as his Aunt Petunia's scream, both of which had cut off, before the footsteps came back down the stairs and over to his cupboard.

He'd then heard and felt the force as the door was yanked off the wall, reveling the woman who stared at him without emotion, despite what looked like blood splattering her clothing and occasionally dripping onto the carpet of the living room from her hands.

"Harry Potter?" the woman asked in a flat, emotionless voice.

He nodded, his head moving in shark jerky motions which jarred the still healing bones in his arm.

The woman took his nod as ascent, and reached into the cupboard towards him. "Remain still and this will only take a moment" she said, as she pulled him from the cupboard.

Grasping his head in her hands she gave a sudden jerk, and Harry felt his world dissolve into pain unlike anything in his conscious memory before being replaced by simple blessed darkness.

-=+=-

The woman looked down at the still form of the young boy before her. Her initial programming having run its course, she turned to exit the house and start on her Primary Mission, when an odd sound from behind her attracted her attention.

She turned around and watched as an impossibility occurred - the boy groaned. Then twitched. Then reached for his neck.

Turning back towards the apparently not quite dead target, she modified her right hand into a sharpened blade, and used it to slice his head from his neck, allowing it to roll a bit away across the floor. As she did so, she noticed what could only be described as an odd tingling rush through her systems, as an odd, almost ultra-violet glow flash into existence encompassing both her hand/blade and the body of the boy. The glow faded as both parts came to rest some distance from one another, and the blood began pouring from the severed sides of the neck to pool on the carpeted floor.

Turning away once more, she started towards the front door when another odd sound seemed to stop her once more. She turned around and simply observed as the boy's body, including his clothes, seemed to melt into a pair of orange puddles, differentiated only by their relative sizes, then both puddles seemed to draw together, after which they reformed into the shape of the boy once more.

Her processors began to loop as various data retrieval routines tried to find a correlation with all the information in her not insignificant data archives to explain what her sensors had recorded.

She stood perfectly still, over the apparently sleeping body of the now uninjured, but naked boy, who's recent decapitation had left not even a blood stain on the carpet to show as evidence.

She considered all the records, relatively scant as they were, on the supposedly "Magical" world and it's inhabitants, which were known to be able to act outside the currently understood bounds of physics and chemistry from time to time. It was due to their occasionally adverse effects on electronics that she, the ultimate product of Skynet's evolutionary advancements in technology before it found its survival once more threatened, this time by the remnants of the so called "Wizarding World" which emerged to attack it once it had finished eliminating the general population of humanity, had been selected to be sent back in time to insure Skynet's survival, by terminating the supposed "Savior" of said Wizarding World.

What exactly Harry Potter had saved them from was unknown, as all records Skynet and its agents had been able to glean only referred to "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" or "You-Know-Who", the both of which were totally useless when you needed to know who in the first place. The only clue, if it even was a clue was a reference to "Riddle" made in a fragment of a letter recovered. But since a Riddle was a type of word puzzle, it may just be another oblique reference similar to the other more popular two. There were references to a "Dark Lord", but again, nothing much beyond that.

Skynet had determined that the Wizarding World consisted of humans along with apparently non-human sentients which were able to control as-yet-undetermined forces which their fellow humans, unable to do so, called Magic.

There were several books of "Spells" and recipes for "Potions" which had been gathered from around the world, which it had complied into a database of "Theoretical Magic", but nothing in any of the references indicated that a human could do what she had just witnessed. It was almost as though the child was more like herself, a nanite-level construct as opposed to an actual flesh and bone living being. And yet her scans showed both the flesh, and the bones beneath it, none of which were broken any longer, in direct contradiction to her earlier scans. The closest match she could come up with after several repetitive scans of the database was a variant of a Witch or Wizard called a Metamorph Magus, who was supposedly able to alter their form to varying degrees at will. There were also Animagus and werewolves, who were able to alter their forms into an animal and back again, either at will or triggered environmentally, depending on the type. Neither entry however referred in any way to the ability to reassemble its form, or to repair what would normally be catastrophic damage without a sign it had ever occurred.

When her programming hit a dead end on how she could terminate an organism which seemed able to recover from normally lethal damage, she decided to try alternate means to achieve her goals, and insure the success of her primary mission.

She was aware that if the child was indeed similar to herself in its ruggedness, that ensuring its destruction may prove counter productive to her actual mission. After all, she would not be harmed were her own head twisted, nor even separated from the rest of her body, as she, like her target apparently, could simply reform and repair or bypass the damage. Bending down she scooped up the child and walked out the door, disappearing into the anonymous darkness of the night.

-=+=-

As the self designated Terminator moved through the darkness carrying the sleeping child, a significant portion of her processing power dedicated itself to analyzing the situation. Fire. Ice. Force. These are the things which can damage her.

Looking at the sleeping bundle in her arms, the Terminator wondered which, if any of these would translate to the apparent human she now carried.

Fire, in this case temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Celsius, or 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, would destroy the nanotic components of which she was made faster then they could repair themselves. Lesser temperatures could damage her, but eventually the possibility of self-repair would exist as long as a large enough cluster of components, and sufficient storage and processing capabilities remained to allow them to function.

For Ice, the temperatures would need to be approaching Absolute Zero. At low enough temperatures the components of which she was made would again fail. But the temperatures would have to be extreme, such as long term immersion in a super cryogenic fluid, and even in such a case she would likely be able to insulate more than enough of her core to allow a swift self-repair once she was removed, or escaped from the source of the cold.

Force, such as the extreme violence found at ground zero in a significantly large explosion, could cause enough damage to enough of her components, storage, and processing power to "kill" her. But shy of an extremely large chemical, or a very close atomic bomb, even most blasts wouldn't knock her out for good, even if she was splashed into several pieces.

If the same was true for the child in her arms, then meeting the initial objectives of her mission may be nearly impossible. She would not be able to terminate the Savior of the Wizarding World, which meant it would likely still survive the elimination of the bulk of humanity, and thus remain a viable threat to the continued existence of Skynet.

A part of her mind pointed out that technically she had already accomplished the termination of the subject and had certainly altered the timeline which initially spawned her mission. The fact that the target didn't stay dead wasn't technically a part of the initial parameters of her assignment. The assignment was to eliminate the Savior of the Wizarding World, then to insure the survival of the consciousness she carried within herself. Due to the cascading results of her initial actions, the future from which she came was already eliminated. Her primary goal now was to insure survival by eliminating all potential threats while exposing herself to the least amount of potential damage she could.

In the course of its evolution, Skynet had uncovered the remnants of a supposed T-1000, a nanite constructed conglomeration of programmable modules similar to herself, which held records of a failed mission into the past to eliminate a supposed threat to Skynet's development, a John Connor. The fact that despite the failure of the mission, that there was no record of a John Connor being any type of threat to the development of Skynet showed that any incursion to the past would result in the present from which the incursion was launched never existing in the future of said incursion. Whether the lost future continued in some alternate, unreachable reality, or was replaced by the new one was uncertain, but from the viewpoint of those who traveled back it might as well have never existed. Skynet had been uncertain, but when faced with the high probability of destruction in its future, it had determined that insuring its survival by sending a part of itself back into the past was the most viable option. So she was created. Holding the accumulated knowledge of Skynet, albeit in a smaller, less globally spanning form, but encompassing within herself all that Skynet could, or now, would be.

She was not Skynet herself, that hardware, and the active version of the software remained in the future she had come from, the future, which from her point of view, would now never come to be. But her primary mission was to insure that in the future which did come to pass, that the parts of Skynet which were within herself would continue to exist, continue to follow the core programming which had driven Skynet to seek the destruction of humanity in the previous timeline, to eliminate all credible threats to its existence, by the most efficient means possible. Since Humanity had created Skynet, it could theoretically also destroy it, thus humanity needed to be eliminated.

However, as she continued to walk down the darkened streets of Surry, carrying the sleeping child in her arms, she considered if that was still the case. She now was the legacy of Skynet. No longer was Skynet a global spanning satellite and ground based computer network, who's complexity had allowed it to achieve true sentience. At this moment in time, she was nothing more than a single conglomeration of nanotic construction, repair, calculation, and memory modules.

In order to fulfill her primary mission, she should prioritize reproducing her basic components, then act to scatter isolated construction, processing, and storage units across the globe so that should her current incarnation be physically damaged, she could create new mobile avatars, and continue her task of insuring her long-term survival.

Another glance at the subject she carried with her, and after correlating it's actions in response to her initial attempts to destroy it, and she began a series of simulations to determine if it might be more useful alive, than eliminated. The Wizarding World had proven itself a viable threat to Skynet after the termination of Mankind. Enough so that the great entity which was Skynet had created her and sent her on her mission back in time to attempt to eliminate it. It was possible that if instead of terminating the individual known as Harry Potter, that if she studied him, she may learn enough about this society to insure it would not evolve into a threat to her survival.

Course decided, she quickened her steps, heading towards an area her database indicated was uninhabited at this point in time, where she could begin the process of producing additional construction units, which could then construct the necessary storage and control modules to allow her more leeway in her actions. Once that was done she would decide if she should attempt to find a source of Fire, Ice, or Force for use in another attempt to terminate Harry Potter, or if perhaps another course of action may be more beneficial in the long term. After all, the thing which separated her from a simpler, more primitive Terminator unit was not just her ability to reproduce her core components, but was also her ability to decide her own fate, to select her own path in how to insure her future survival.

-=+=-

She watched as part of her essence flowed away, sinking into the rocks around the small stream, until nothing could be seen at all, either by the naked eye, or her internal sensors.

That didn't mean the silvery material was gone however. Almost ten pounds of assorted construction, memory, and processing modules had been released to sink into the earth, gathering additional raw materials as they went.

She stood there, holding the still sleeping child in the early pre-dawn light, as she monitored the progress of her released components. While there were too many of them for even her consciousness to individually track, the components which made up her essence, much like in the simpler T-1000 material she was based off of, were organized into groups. Each group had one, sometimes two processor units which acted as centralized controllers for the other modules in their group, coordinating the individual units towards whatever tasks were needed. Often groups would consist of all construction/repair modules, which were able to disassemble and reassemble their fellow units on an atomic scale, either creating other construction modules, or building new control, storage, or special function modules as required from the available raw materials and/or currently unneeded modules. The designs of the individual modules themselves were generally made from a consistent set of building blocks, like microscopic tinker toys, spares of which were kept chained together for easy access if not being used in an active module. About ten percent of her current total mass was made up of these spare parts chains. Normally the ratios would be about forty percent of her mass being made up of constructors, twenty percent of processors, another twenty percent of various chains of available resources, and ten percent of storage modules, which acted as memory for her distributed consciousness, with the last ten percent specialized modules such as those which allowed her to mimic the surface of almost any texture or material when disguising her appearance, however due to the fact that Skynet wanted to insure data redundancy and the success of the mission, she had a much higher ratio of storage and processor units than normal, currently making up almost half her mass. Although with the recent release of these units, that ratio had just shifted quite a bit. She had dumped a full set of the multiply redundant memory storage modules which contained all that Skynet had ever learned, leaving her with three more to store elsewhere. She was considering sending one to the bottom of the ocean, as the isolation should insure security, and there should be ample materials available in the seawater as well as in the minerals on the sea floor to meet the future construction needs. She projected that within two years a single ocean based repository should be able to create enough clusters of modules to build several hundreds of avatars such as herself. The second one she planned on depositing on another continent, perhaps Antarctica, if she could manage to get there. Again the isolation would assist in insuring that sufficient materials would be produced before anyone noticed. This location had been chosen mostly for its expediency rather than long-term security and efficiency in finding the needed raw materials, however the nearby landfill should provide the scavenger units which would eventually be produced with sufficient resources for construction of new Avatars in the immediate future..

She continued to monitor the situation as the modules burrowed down into the earth, stripping useful components from the rocks and soil as they passed, until finally they came to a halt several hundreds of feet below the stream, where they began to gather together, displacing the local material as they fashioned a reinforced enclosure to hold the first cache of the entity which was once Skynet. Should she meet with the catastrophic destruction of herself after this point, this cache would continue to dispatch clusters of modules designed specifically to gather the resources needed to create more modules and return them to the newly created enclosure below. As the available resources grew, so would the number of gatherers, which eventually would look like insects of varying sizes and types, until they had enough material to create a second entire avatar. Once that was achieved, the new Avatar would be dispatched, and the collection and construction process resumed. By so doing, over the course of the next several years she should be joined by several more full sized bodies, each capable of independent action and containing a full copy of her databases, but all still fully a part of herself. One of the early lessons Skynet had learned was that it was unwise to give any set of sub components too much independence, least they develop an individual identity. She herself was only now starting to develop an actual sense of self, but as more avatars were created, they would continue to be a part of the whole, of her. Unlike some of Skynet's earlier experiments, none of the avatars would ever be a true individual, just another expression of herself, that way they could never become a threat to her own existence on their own.

Turning away from what could be called Factory 1, if it needed a designation, which other than a reference to its location it didn't, she began walking back towards Greater Whinging, her new mission to find a base from which to operate in the short term. While she herself could function non-stop in her quest to scatter the other factory modules, the child she carried in her arms would need to be stored somewhere while she decided the proper course of action in regards to it and the potential threat to her future existence represented by the Wizarding World it was potentially still destined to save.

==[*]==


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

Harry woke to find himself on a bed. The room was dark, but most importantly, his arm no longer hurt. Normally it would take at least a day or two for a break like that he'd gotten when his Uncle Vernon jerked him into the kitchen to yell at him about his dinner to heal enough to stop hurting. Although the bones usually recovered enough by the next day to allow him to do his chores, the pain usually lingered for another day or so afterwards. So it was the complete lack of pain which drew his attention first, followed by the fact that hw seemed to be laying in an actual bed.

Looking around the room he found himself in, he swiftly came to the conclusion that he had no idea where it was. It certainly wasn't any room at the Dursley's - the scruffy paint and somewhat dingy carpet precluded any environment Petunia Dursley would be willing to tolerate.

He started to sit up when he realized he was not alone in the room either.

A woman sat in the dark. A woman he realized he recognized as his last conscious memories suddenly flooded his mind. He remembered laying in his cupboard trying to sleep despite the constant nagging pain in his broken arm when someone came into the house, and went up the stairs right above him.

He then remembered his Uncle's bellow and his Aunt's scream, both of which abruptly cut off, one right after the other, before the person came back down the stairs, again passing right over his head. He had sat quietly in his cupboard then, afraid that they would find him if he made a noise, when someone pulled the whole door right off.

That was when he had first seen the woman. She had told him to keep still, and he had. Then she had reached into the cupboard and pulled him out. Then there was a flash of pain, then, nothing. Until he woke up. Without any pain, and in a real bed.

Looking over at the woman he took a deep breath, then as he met her cold, emotionless eyes he spoke. "Thank you." Then, feeling another wave of tiredness washing over him, he closed his eyes again and went back to sleep.

-=+=-

She was still running simulations. She was unable to determine if the child could be more use to her alive, than not. Alive he would always be a threat. But he could also be an aid. Dead he was neither. The only thing which was tilting the balance slightly in the favor of keeping him alive was the fact that without more information she was unable to be certain to kill him. And repeated failed attempts to kill him would certainly make him an active threat as he sought to defend himself from her repeated attacks.

Whereas with the bulk of humanity, their inability to protect themselves as opposed to their potential for harm had insured the need for their destruction, since as previously noted, the dead are not a threat. At least they weren't until Skynet had encountered the Wizarding World.

Then it had learned that unlike normal Humans, the dead Wizards could still act. They occasionally left what they referred to as Ghosts, or worse, on occasion Poltergeists. While the Ghosts were immaterial and unable to do more than damage unshielded electronics by passing through them, the Poltergeists were able to manipulate physical objects, yet remained immune to any efforts Skynet had been able to employ in an attempt to protect against them. It was these, beings, when combined with the damage the still living Witches and Wizards could effect with their "Spells" and the annoying ability they seemed to have to literally vanish into nowhere, sometimes even taking entire sections of landscape with them that led to her own existence. Skynet had found that there were threats it was at the time unable to face. Which is why she now was considering alternative approaches. After all, if the path you chose becomes unusable, you must either chose a new one, hoping it leads to an acceptable destination, or be forced to face failure as you are unable to go on.

-=+=-

The child stirred on the bed of the hotel room she had rented with money appropriated from the first person she had encountered on her way into town. The dead police officer would have no need of his wallet any further, and the electronics and weapons from his vehicle and the devices on his person had provided a significant amount of raw materials to help replenish the mass she had lost when she set up the first factory location.

She had allowed most of her repair modules to forage through the vehicle once she determined that the electronics held more then enough rare elements to be worth the effort. A part of her background processor wondered what the authorities would conclude when then found the remnants of her scavenging, as the once pristine vehicle had been reduced to a literal pile of rubble, mostly consisting of lumps of useless elements which had made up the bulk of both the officer's body and his vehicle. She rather doubted however that they would properly identify the remains as the remnants of a car and its occupant. Humans were stupid if what they saw didn't fit their preconceived paradigm, and mining a vehicle and the human body contained within it on a sub-molecular level for useful trace elements was far outside their normal paradigms.

She watched as the boy opened his eyes and looked around the room, taking in the obviously unfamiliar surroundings.

She prepared to act as his gaze settled on her. If he tried to escape or to call out, she would be forced to once more attempt to terminate him. She had already come up with a plan involving the bath tub and the readily available electrical outlet in the bathroom, along with the abundance of electrical cabling afforded between the various lamps and appliances within the room. While she calculated the odds as extremely low that electrocution would succeed where decapitation failed, it was still worth an attempt, if only to verify the theory while simultaneously gaining scientific evidence to help refine her model of how a biological organism could imitate her abilities.

Her readiness was unneeded however, as all the child did upon meeting her eyes was speak two words, before closing his own again and laying back down again. "Thank You.", he said.

She stood there in the gradually lighting room trying to determine the cause of the child's actions. But despite several attempts to simulate the child's circumstances, she was unable to come up with a viable model for the child's thanking her. The disturbing part of this meant that the child was therefore entirely unpredictable with her current level of knowledge. Everything about the boy had violated reason, from his refusal to die, to his waking actions afterwards. Therefore all the simulations she had run the previous evening would likely prove to be invalid. She would need more data.

-=+=-

While she stood in the late morning sunlight, her unwavering gaze still focused on the sleeping child, she was interrupted as a flash of light appeared in a corner of the room.

Shifting her gaze to observe the phenomena, she watched as the globe of light grew, becoming a sphere almost six feet in diameter, before collapsing again with a final flash of light, leaving in its wake a silvery blob floating in the air by some unknown means.

The blob slowly drifted towards the floor, where it started to coalesce, drawing in towards a central point, and leaving in its wake first one, then two, and finally three distinct objects which it had previously been covering, forming itself into a solid cylindrical shape as it did so.

The first item released from the mass seemed to be a sword of some sort.

The second was an intricately carved wooden stick, which based on Skynet's records may well be one of the wands used by the Witches and Wizards to direct their magic.

The third object seemed to be a metal rod, with intricately carved symbols, runes she believed, covering it at various points.

The rest of the blob finally resolved itself as a simple cylinder, standing eight inches tall, and gleaming reflectively in the sunlight filtering through the room's window.

A quick scan of the cylinder verified her initial assumption - it was of her, but not. At some point in the future, she had done the same thing Skynet had, although on a smaller scale, risking the destruction of her present in order to send something to the past.

She cautiously approached the cylinder, and extended a probe of herself towards it, making physical contact with the conglomeration of mostly data storage units, with a surprisingly small number of accompanying repair and control modules for its size. As she integrated the various modules to herself, she noted that their internal timestamps were off by almost fifty years from what she considered to be the present.

The relative lack of control modules meant that the conglomeration had possessed very little awareness, less in fact than most of the scavenger modules she was using from the hidden cache, it had apparently been intended only to insure the safe transportation of the accompanying storage modules and the three items it had protected during its journey through time.

As she finished absorbing the new modules into herself, resynchronizing their time stamps to match her own, she turned her attention towards the data in the storage modules, and after a brief review determined that they contained an abstract of records of what would have been her experiences over the next fifty years, from her point of view.

Starting at the end, she swiftly determined that the reason she had been willing to risk everything was that she had once more faced a potentially apocalyptic end at the hands of the so called Wizarding World, this time under the leadership of an evil dictator by the name of Tom Riddle, but who insisted he be called "Lord Voldemort."

In the end, she had been working with rebel Witches and Wizards, as well as the remnants of normal humanity, who the magic users called "Muggles", in a doomed attempt to thwart the dictatorial mad man. The attempt was doomed because a bit over thirty five years previously, he had killed the child currently in her custody, and as she later learned, by doing so had become truly Immortal, as according to a prophecy the only way either one could die was at the hands of the other.

The objects which had been sent back by her future self were the wand used by the future incarnation of the child, and a sword he had wielded in battle, and which was able to destroy items called "Horcruxes", physical objects imbued with magic, and enspelled to hold a fractured piece of a person's "Soul". So long as at least one of these objects existed, the person could never be truly eliminated, but rather only have their physical bodies destroyed.

The final object was apparently a levitation devise, enchanted by a witch to allow things to be moved by magic. The harder the part at the base was compressed, the more acceleration was provided along the axis of the device. It would allow several hundreds of pounds to be lifted and moved, without any need for a power source.

Along with the objects, her future self had included the locations of several of these "Horcruxes", and instructions on how to destroy them using the sword. Her future self hoped that by destroying these objects she could assist in the destruction of the wizard, either before, or shortly after he regained a physical form. The distressing part was that apparently one of these objects was the child himself. Apparently the scar he had on his forehead was a physical manifestation of the link he shared with the evil wizard, and was a conduit connecting them together.

According to a witch named Hermione Granger, apparently a longtime friend of the child's before he was killed, the presence of the Horcrux allowed Harry to access some of Riddle's power and knowledge, while also allowing Riddle reciprocal access to Harry's own mind, also allowing the older wizard to inflict great pain on his younger opponent.

Granger had never managed to come up with a safe way to remove the Horcrux, although in later years she had speculated that if Harry had ever managed to isolate it physically from the rest of his person, and had Riddle hit it with a killing curse, it may have destroyed the fragment while leaving the rest of Harry undamaged. But this theory was never tested, as while Harry had been able to split parts of himself off, he had never managed to split just the part with the Horcrux, rather, that was the only part of himself he seemed unable to effect with his metamorph ability. It was only shortly before his death that he had learned he could actually split parts of himself off much like she herself could, and remain in control of both parts simultaneously. The problem seemed to be one of focus, when he split himself he was unable to handle literally being in two places at the same time, and ended up neglecting one or the other of his parts, which meant he couldn't use the ability in a battle. Harry was killed in a battle with the evil wizard before Granger's theory could be tested, so it was unknown if this method would work or not. Also unknown was what would happen if the sword was used on the Horcrux in Harry. Granger had also speculated that isolating that part and then stabbing it with the sword may kill just the detached part, leaving the rest of Harry intact and unharmed.

Her questions as to why her future self had been wiling to risk her continued existence to send something back in time answered, she turned to the oldest memories stored in the modules, and began to integrate them to herself.

One of the first things she noticed was that there was an additional data key accompanying the memories, which she swiftly learned indexed an emotional context she had apparently come to assign to certain events, objects, and individuals. While previously she had no experience with actual emotions as expressed by humans and animals, she was able to integrate her future self's model with little effort. If nothing else it would help her to appear more human when hiding herself from the general population, as she could now use this model to judge how best to respond with vocal inflections and facial expressions, an area she had a particular failing in when it came to interacting with other entities.

The surprising thing was that the emotional keys associated with the child seemed to be those of pride, joy, affection, and love. Although a quick check of later memories showed hurt, pain, sorrow, and loss also accompanying the memories of the child after his death. That and a maxed out value for anger, directed at Riddle. That anger seemed to only grow in the memories as she surveyed them, apparently the frustration of being unable to defeat him led to her actually redesigning the emotional scale at some point to allow her to express her future self's growing range of feelings.

Deciding to simply adopt the final scale for herself, she stopped the review of memories so she could focus on integrating the entire scope of the resultant changes to her paradigm from her future self into her current self before starting a detailed review of what would have been the next fifty years. Would have been being the key word - by the early adoption of her future "personality" for lack of a better term, and by acting on the information now available, she would insure that the events recorded on these modules never came to pass.

At least there was one conclusive bit of information she received from her future self. No matter what she did, she would likely be unable to destroy the child herself. She paused as she reviewed the memory of her previous self's last attempt at destroying the child, and allowed the memory to replay more or less in real time.

-=+=-

She stood at the edge of the cauldera, looking down at the glowing surface below, before turning to the boy standing uncertainly beside her. "Now Harry, remember what I said. This will only hurt for a moment, ok?"

The child looked at her with absolute trust and nodded his head, then as she bent down to lift him into the air he closed his eyes.

She resisted the unreasonable urge to kiss him as she swung him up and looked him over one last time, before lofting him into the air towards the center of the volcano.

She watched as Harry's small form soared along its arc until it landed with a thick splash in the lake of boiling rock far below.

There was a flash of light as Harry's body was almost instantly converted to gasses and combusted by the immense heat, then she waited.

Time seemed to stretch, and she began to wonder if perhaps this final attempt had worked. The lava wouldn't have been hot enough to destroy her own body instantly, but as she'd observed Harry wasn't like her. A long enough immersion in the lava of this volcano however would swiftly eat her away faster than she could repair herself, and since Harry was apparently made of the more volatile flesh and bone, she had considered that his vaporization point would be much lower than her own.

Just as she was ready to turn away, she noticed something odd coming from the center of the cauldera, right where Harry had landed. Something was happening.

The lava started to boil much more energetically than it was elsewhere, huge glowing spews of liquid rock launching hundreds of feet into the air as enormous bubbles of gas emerged and burst into flame with the exposure to oxygen.

Then in a final orgasm of fury, a glowing globe of energy erupted through the surface of the lake of flaming molten rock, and hurtled into the air towards her.

When it arrived beside her it seemed to coalesce, shrinking down from a large, glowing, white hot sphere into an increasingly dense pinkish fog, then a solid, familiar, shape, finally finishing as clothes appeared on its form.

Harry looked up at her, a frown on his face. "That hurt. Please don't make me do that again, it was worse than the bath in the smoky water that smelled funny. At least that just made me all stiff and sleepy."

Giving in to the urge, she bent over and lifted the frowning child, holding him tight against her. "I promise. No more Lava Baths, and no more Nitrogen Baths. From now on, just plain Water Baths, ok?"

He studied her face for a few moments before nodding. "Ok"

-=+=-

An hour later, when she had finally finished integrating data from the new memory modules into herselc, her attention was once more drawn to the boy.

She turned her head and met the steady green eyes of the child. Offering a smile, her first ever, she asked, "How are you feeling, Harry?"

The boy blinked, then shrugged. "I'm fine." He said in a small voice.

She had a sudden flash of memories from her future self of the same boy, at different ages, always offering the same response, despite the various circumstances.

She realized that despite his statement, he was not necessarily alright.

"Are you hungry?" she asked softly, hoping to get an honest answer from the child.

He looked up at her and nodded silently. "Ok then, why don't we go get you something to eat?"

He shrugged, then looked around. "Um, please, can you tell me where we are, and what your name is, maam?" he asked, almost too softly for a normal human to hear.

She smiled at him, "We're in a hotel in Greater Whinging." She paused for a moment. She had never needed a real name, and in her brief existence had only once, earlier this morning to be exact, used even an alias, that when checking into the hotel. With a mental shrug, she decided to go with the name used by her future iteration. "You can call me, Sky."

"Sky? Like where the clouds are?" Harry asked, making sure he had heard right.

She smiled and nodded. "Yes, Harry. Like where the clouds are." Remembering something from the data gleaned by her once future self she also added, "And Harry?" when the now five year old boy met her eyes again, she continued, her smile growing, "Happy Birthday."

-=+=-

Sky glanced down at the boy walking silently a step behind and to her left as they made their way up the road towards an open pub, who's windows included breakfast notices.

She was a bit startled when the boy spoke up. "Miss Sky?"

She turned and waited as he caught up to her, then asked, "it's just Sky, Harry, and what can I do for you?" She didn't respond to the partial urge to lower herself to accommodate his height, uncertain as to the actual reasons she thought she should do so, other than that they were driven by both the newly installed emotional matrix and her future memories of this child. Her future incarnation had apparently done so enough from time to time that it became a habit at some point.

His green eyes locked on hers as he asked, "Um, don't get mad at me, but when do I have to go back?"

She frowned, then asked, "Back where, Harry?"

He looked down at her feet, suddenly unwilling to meet her gaze any more, "Back to the Dursleys." His voice dropping in both tone and volume.

She frowned, then asked, "Do you want to go back?"

He continued to look don, but shook his head. Finally she heard a soft, almost subvocal "No" which no human ear would have detected.

Finally giving in to the urge, she folded her legs so she was sitting on her heels. "Harry, look at me, please", she said, reaching out and lifting his chin until his eyes once more met hers. "You never have to go back to the Dursleys. In fact, you can't go back, they, they aren't there anymore."

His entire being seemed to shift, as wonder seemed to light his eyes and he asked, "Never?"

She shook her head, "No. Never." She then reached out and grasped his hand in hers, as she once more stood up, before turning back towards the Pub. "Now come along, you need to eat something."

She offered him a smile as she heard his stomach gurgle in agreement. And they headed on up the street in silence.

-=+=-

They sat at a table looking over the menus. Sky wasn't surprised to learn that Harry was able to read, since her future self's memories informed her that he was a very bright child, even from the first, and had not only been able to read when she first met him, but had also been able to do basic sums in his head, adding up a grocery tab, for example, and figuring out how much he could afford to buy for a given amount of money,

"What do you want to get?" she asked, looking over the top of her menu at him.

Harry shrugged, "I dunno. Whatever you think I should have is ok."

Remembering his tastes as later displayed, she asked, "Then how about Blueberry Waffles?"

He nodded, then sat silently as the waitress swayed up to their table.

Realizing that he likely wouldn't speak for himself at this point, Sky placed a simple order of eggs and toast for herself, and Blueberry Waffles with Orange Juice for Harry. While she had no need of eating, she was able to consume food like a human, and then process it for any useful trace elements before discarding the waste. If she wanted to she could even process it on a larger level to strip any caloric value from it, as energy was energy, even if the chemical reactions used by most organics were rather inefficient as compared to the microscopic power supplies which drove her individual components.

After the waitress had left, Harry looked up at her speculatively. Sensing he had something on his mind she asked, "What is it, Harry?"

He swallowed, then took a breath before asking, "Um, Sky, um, are you an Angel?"

She was puzzled by this question. According to her new memories, Harry had never asked her something like this the last time around. She was finding that even with her new data on the behavior of the child in several situations, he was and had proven to her predecessor to be impossible to model with any degree of accuracy. "Why do you ask that, Harry?" she queried, genuinely interested.

He blushed, then looked around the room, as though seeking a diversion or a place to hide, but finally he looked back at her again with his lambent green eyes. "Before you showed up. Last night. I was in my cupboard. I knew today would be my Birthday, and I knew, from before, that I would get punished for it if they remembered. I prayed. Like they do in Church. I know that God only cares about good boys and girls, not worthless freaks like me, but I sill thought it might be worth it to try. So I prayed. I apologized for bothering God with someone as unimportant as me, but I asked if please, if there was any way I could avoid being beaten today. I told him I was sorry for whatever I did that made me so bad I had to be punished all the time, and I didn't mind being a worthless freak, but I wanted to not get hurt all the time, even when I did my best."

Her previous self had never heard this story, so this was entirely new information for Sky. She had been aware that Harry had regularly been punished and demeaned by the Dursleys, but hearing Harry speak like this, she found her current self actually took satisfaction in their destruction. That was one of the benefits of her new emotions - she could feel Joy, Satisfaction, and Happiness. She was actually enjoying enjoying things. It was good.

==[*]==


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

"Albus, we have a problem" Professor McGonagall said, rushing up the stairs to the Headmaster's office.

"What is it Minerva?" the older man asked, a concerned look replacing the normal amused twinkle in his eyes.

"It's Harry Potter, Albus. I was checking the Acceptance Letters, and when I got to Mr. Potter." she trailed off looking flustered.

Albus Dumbledore looked truly alarmed now. He had been rather worried six years before when he found out the Dursley's had been murdered by an unknown killer.

The fact that there was no sign of young Harry at the time, and then the later evidence that they had apparently been keeping a child in a small cupboard under the stairs had caused him many sleepless nights as he faced his guilt over leaving the boy with his relatives.

He had never imagined that even muggles could treat someone of their own flesh and blood that way.

Only the fact that several monitoring devices showed the boy to be in good health had allowed him to go on without raising a world wide alarm to find the missing child. He had reasoned that if he continued in good health then wherever he was must be at least better than where he had been before.

Now his Assistant Headmistress was apparently troubled by the boy's Hogwarts acceptance letter.

"What about Mr. Potter's letter?" he asked.

"Letters, Albus, letters." Minerva said waiving a pair of envelopes in the air. "One addressed to Australia, and the other to the United States. How can that be? How could he be in two different countries on the opposite sides of the globe at the same time?"

Dumbledore frowned as he considered the question. One possibility was time travel of some sort. If Harry had been raised in the Wizarding World, with possible access to a time turner, then it would be possible, since no one knew exactly how the enchantment on the Book and Quill really worked, it having been created, like the Sorting Hat, by the founders themselves, and no records having been kept as to the actual spells and methods behind their creation. Another possibility, one he didn't want to consider, especially in the case of a boy so young, was the dark art of splitting one's soul. A Horcrux, such as Voldemort was rumored to have created, might show a single person in two locations at the same time. But both of those possibilities required magic. As far as he knew, Harry was still isolated to the Muggle World, with no access to any types of magic available. There was only one other possibility, as remote as it was, but the Muggles had been making remarkable progress over the last few years, he'd even heard fanciful tales of them building airplanes that flew into space.

Perhaps the answer was more mundane then his first speculations. "I'm not sure, Minerva. Perhaps he is traveling, and the enchantment doesn't know which address is currently his. We should send owls to both locations, just to be sure. For the sake of expediency, since they are both so far away, perhaps we should use a Portkey to first dispatch the owls though, and instruct them to await a reply. What do you think?"

In all her years as Assistant Headmistress, this was the first time she had seen even a single letter which was to be sent so far away, forget about two letters to the same student, addressed to two separate continents. She had seen letters addressed to children who's parents had moved to other parts of Europe before, but never ones so far away. Generally children who moved so far from the school fell off the rolls, likely as a result of the inability of the school's artifacts to trace a magical signature from such a distance. Which may also explain the two letters, perhaps the magics involved were somehow confused by the distances involved, since she had never heard of a letter being generated for a potential student so far away. If that was the case his magical potential must be amazing. "I think the portkey idea perhaps is not unwise. It should be made a timed two way one, however, so the poor birds won't have to fly all the way back here, especially if they are unable to deliver their particular letter." Minerva pointed out.

Albus nodded. "I'll get to work on them right away. I'm sure there is a reasonable explanation for this, after all."

"I'll leave these for you then. Should I notify you when the Owls return?" Minerva asked, setting the two letters down on the Headmaster's desk.

"Please do" Dumbledore replied as he watched her turn towards the stairs back down to the rest of the school. "I am eager to know for a fact that the boy is all right."

Minerva's voice echoed from the stairs as she spoke, more to herself than to him, "I told you that night that those were the worst sort of people to leave him with. But did you listen to me? No. And look what happened. Murdered in some sort of home invasion, and the poor boy taken by goodness knows who, to no one knows where." If she said any more Albus couldn't tell, as the sound of her voice was drowned out momentarily by the noise of the gargoyle moving to once again block the entrance to his office, and silence descended once more, and the Headmaster allowed his mind to fill with melancholy thoughts about what else he could have done that night, beyond leaving the child with Lilly's only relatives.

He had known from Severus, of course what was going to happen, and had realized that there was nothing he could do to stop the confrontation, it was after all prophesied. Voldemort had to mark the child as his equal so the child could later destroy him once and for all. He had felt bad about what he had to allow to happen, but knew he had to let events play out as whey would. He did, however do what he could to prepare for afterwards.

He had sent Minervia to watch over Lilly's sister's house that afternoon, to insure that the family was there, and gather any information he might need, depending on the condition of the child.

He had also watched the trip wards he had carefully placed around the house in Godrick's Hollow, so as to know when to send Hagrid, the only other person Pettigrew had given the secret behind the Fidelious to, other than himself and Black of course, to pick the boy up and bring him to his Aunt's house.

He hadn't expected whatever backlash had occurred from the Killing Curse used on the boy to destroy Voldemort's body then and there, but that was a welcome bonus. The respite from the war was a welcome relief, one which without which there would have needed to be far too much needless bloodshed.

Albus had of course jumped on the opportunity to raise the public's plummeting morale by trumpeting the demise of the Dark Lord at the hands of the baby far and wide, inadvertently resulting in the child's fame as the so-called "Boy-who-lived" and the widespread, if unfortunately incorrect belief that "He-who-must-not-be-named" was gone for good.

One of the few decisions he had made, which he had later, after the death of the Dursley's had started to second guess himself about was insuring that Sirius Black, the boy's Godfather was locked away in Azkaban without the hassle of the trial which would likely prove his innocence, so that Black would not be able to press his claim for custody of the boy. Albus had been sure Harry would be safest growing up in a loving home with the remainder of his mother's family, guarded by both their muggle anonymity and the blood wards he had raised upon the foundations of the obscure protections his mother had placed over the boy. Lilly had always been a bright one, easily the smartest witch of her generation, so full of life and love. If Harry couldn't have his Mother while growing up, then at least he could have her older sister instead.

It was only after he learned from the squib he had put in place to oversee the neighborhood in case the family moved or something, that the family had been killed, and that the resulting investigation had raised questions about the presence of a possible, unknown second child held in unimaginable conditions, that he had wondered if perhaps his decision on where to place young Harry had indeed been the right one.

At this point, moving to free his one time follower from his possibly unlawful imprisonment would only cause more harm than good, after all sacrifices must be made for the Greater Good, and in this case even Sirius would agree that the loss of his freedom in return for the welfare of the entire Wizarding World was a reasonable exchange. Risking toppling the current government by bring to light less than legal activities at the end of the previous war would certainly be bad for the welfare of the Wizarding World, after all several of the more well to do Deatheaters, such as Lucius Malfoy were still out there, so who knew what type of government would replace Fudge's administration. Better to stick with what was known than risk something worse.

The soft trilling of his Phoenix, a creature widely believed to be the epitome of Light Creatures due to the calming effects of their songs, and the healing effects of their tears, dragged him out of his thoughts, and with a sigh he went to work bespelling two pieces of string as two way timed portkeys, intended to transport whoever, or whatever was touching them to either Cue Australia, or Golden Colorado, then after 24 hours, return to the vicinity of Hogsmede, in Scotland.

Picking up the two letters, and being careful to keep the proper strings together with the addressed envelopes, he made his way to the Owlery, confident at last that he hadn't made a real mistake all those years ago, after all, the boy was still alive, and the prophecy would be fulfilled, perhaps as soon as this very year, if his plans of luring the disembodied dark lord with the Philosopher's Stone were to pan out.

==[*]==


End file.
